“The Long Tail” is a phrase that has been used to describe a particular type of statistical distribution. In The Long Tail distributions, a high frequency/amplitude population is followed by a low frequency/amplitude population, with the low frequency/amplitude population making up the majority of the distribution. Such a distribution occurs in some business environments. For example, a company may offer numerous products that are in low demand and/or have a low sales volume. However, with a sufficiently large distribution channel, the cumulative sales volume/demand for these products may comprise a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively fewer high demand/sales volume products offered by the company.
In system development (e.g., information system development), various issues with respect to a system being developed/maintained can be tracked and stored in a database. For example, various defects, customer requirements, help topics, and/or the like, which have been identified for possible action (e.g., resolution, implementation, etc.) can be tracked in a database. Typically, a manager/developer will select a subset of the high priority issues based on a single attribute (e.g., severity) and address these first for inclusion in a subsequent release. In this approach, it is presumed that addressing this subset of issues will provide the maximum benefit given the constraints on time and resources. However, this approach often filters out issues having a lower priority for the attribute, sometimes permanently, due to continually discovered higher priority issues.
Relational databases provide a variety of query tools for retrieving and filtering data. However, it is often difficult to analyze the data, such as comparing two result sets. Various visual approaches have been proposed for assisting a user in querying data. These approaches include presenting the user with a graphical indication of the location of a query term in a document, recombining document subsets using lists of keywords, using tag clouds to present a qualitative characterization of a data set on the basis of a fixed attribute, and/or the like. Further, other approaches graphically present data in a dataset as a series of connected nodes, bar charts based on quantity, and/or the like, which enable a user to drill down on records.